Those who know me may well wonder why they have not seen
much of my ugly pan over the past few PCA seasons, nor over the past few
events.Yet somehow I find the time to
write these indecypherable and often incomprehensible diatribes John Hajny elects
to put in the Redline.Must be a slow
month for news.

Anyway, and especially for those who know me, I have not
fallen from the face of the planet; I have merely had a career of late which
placed substantial demands on my professional time, leaving me inadequate
personal time for PCA unless it was WITH my family (ergo Parades) or fulfilling
my need for a “fix” (ie. Track).

This is simply a reflection of one immutable law; if you can
afford to do it, you don’t have time.And Vice Versa.I am now managing
a multi-state project converting a multinational product form.Nothing special, just what I’ve prepared a
whole career for.But where it involves
you, dear readers, is not merely in my inability to participate as much as I
would like in the social goings-on of CNY-PCA, but in what I have learned along
the way.In any week, I am likely to be
in no fewer than four states, and over a month that becomes no less than
nine.Adding recent Parades and other business
trips, I have visited fourteen states recently, plus three other countries
including Canada (which is more like another state than another country, except
in Quebec, but more on that later).Anyway, my schedule requires me to spend enormous time studying boring
roads.

In all that time, I have noted The Law, and its relative
impact on behaviors.How many of you
know that Montana has The Law, but it is vaguely written as “reasonable and
prudent”?It did my heart a world of
good to read how someone was judged by his peers to have been so when he was
ticketed for 100+ ; made me think of the same scenario were I to insist on jury
by my peers - I expect I’d see the charge reduced to OBSTRUCTING based on my
peer group of Zone One Instructors.But I
digress (as usual).Recently, New York
got a little less silly when it decided to convert a limited few rural
interstate sections to 65 mph, but of course not all highways so constructed
are included.Even lowly Rhode Island,
and that bastion of Liberalism (who ever dreamed of that term for a bunch of
people who want everyone to have the right to do whatever it is THEY want them
to have the right to do?); Massachussets, treats its citizens as being somewhat
more intelligent than those in Connecticut, where The Law remains as it had
been before the Conservatives (another group bent on assuring the world can
continue to bear arms and vice versa, and insists on “family values”, unless
your family happens to disagree with THEIR family) reversed The Law imposed by
one of their own; Dick Nixon.But it
seems to suggest to me that our “leaders” somehow view us as at least twenty
percent more stupid than those in, for example, Oklahoma, where the posted
limit is 75.Mind you, the roads and
cars are all constructed to the same engineering standards.Working in Bethel, CT, but staying in
Newburgh, NY, I get to drive I-84 for about 40 miles each way.I notice a frustrating tendency to forget the
first rule of good driving; be invisible.That is not to say I want you to leave your lights off; rather to cause
as little disruption to the natural flow as possible.For an example, consider this;Even if you are in violation of the prime
directive re. maximum velocity (55 there), if you have a car behind and no car
ahead, and you are not in the right lane, then you are in the WRONG lane.In Germany (yes, I know they are not perfect;
but they at least have some idea what lane discipline looks like) The Law reads
like this; if you are not in the right lane and you have a three pointed star
rammed up your respective butt, it is your fault.Next case.There is no extenuating circumstance, and no legal mumbo-jumbo to protect
you.You were going too slow to be
there.Period.And that gets to my second saying; Keep right
except to pass, and PASS is an ACTIVE verb.If you have’t got the ponies, stay off the rail.That’s where the rabbit runs.And if you simply MUST pull out from behind
that truck up that hill, use the loud pedal on the right at Larry Lee’s 914-6
cruise control setting (the STOP) until you are by, and then get back
right.AS soon as you clear the other vehicle.If you are afraid he might catch you, so you
need more clearace, I refer you back three sentences, and a study of The Law of
inertia.The fly in our soup here is
instant-on radar which doesn’t give a hoot for circumstances.And since EVERYBODY is over the limit anyway,
it’s a catch-22.But it creates bad
situations where “good citizens” block us criminal element until one of us
hardened criminals decides to do something stupid which endangers us all.But why 55 there, and not 10 miles west of Newburgh?

At the heart of all this jerrymandering and gamesmanship has
been the argued essential truth; “speed kills”.Repeated by the Naderites until it became a mantra, it was held as
causal when statistics happened to coincide, and held in contempt when they
happened to not.Unfortunately, truth is
never so simplistic as a slogan would like to suggest, and statistics are a way
of putting words to numbers which may have no relationship whatsoever.A simple thought experiment proves my
point.Two people, intending to commit
suicide, jump at precisely the same time from the same building; one from the
10th floor, one from the 20th.Because
both intend to die, neither is startled nor terrified as the ground effectively
rushes up toward them, and so do not die on the way, as it were, of heart attack,
etc.The one from the 20th floor goes
faster, but the slow one dies first.I
know it’s absurd; most people on the road have no intention of dying.But it IS still truth.Now imagine two parachutists, neither
intending to die, jumping from ten and twenty thousand feet respectively.They, too, will suffer no heart attacks,
etc.It is scientific fact that,
although gravity diminishes minutely for the higher jumper, the air resistance
will allow him to reach a slightly higher velocity than the lower jumper, but
at the same altitude each will eventually reach the same terminal velocity of
about 200 mph.Let us suppose they
arrive at that point together.For the
purposes of our experiment, at this point they are indistinguishable, except
that the higher speed for one resulted in no implicit difference from the
other, and both attained higher velocities than either of our earlier
unfortunates.

Now let us suppose that they arrive at the fail-safe point
and they attempt to deploy their respective chutes.One opens, the other sounds like a Chatty
Cathy doll.The former survives, the
latter; not.By the simplistic sloganeering,
both should be dead, and compared with the building jumpers, their likelyhood
of doing so should be higher.Yet
clearly, they had a lower probability from the outset; the suicides INTENDED
death, the chutists certainly not.But
something went wrong, and that is The Law of which I write.No, not murphy; physics.

Realistically, with the possible exception of A. Einstein’s
value for C, the speed of light, there is no intrinsic or actual “speed limit”.The issue of increasing the ultimate speed we
attain is more a question of the sum of thrust less drag and what it costs to
improve either.And relative to a point
in space, you dear readers are ALWAYS traveling at about 800 mph at our
latitude, which makes another 55 one way or the other somewhat inconsequential
(think about the 25,000 mile circumference of the earth divided by 24 hours,
and you see my point).But again I
digress.Of the four persons in our
thought experiment, only one survived.But if we suppose that he was originally jumping from the highest
altitude, then one could with total statistical accuracy argue he is alive
because he went faster than the rest.See how absurd the government gets with reading numbers?Figures may not lie, but liars figure.Causality and coincidence are often
incorrectly attributed.

The TRUTH is that TIME, not VELOCITY, could be described as
causal of his survival.And except for
the need for attaining some minimum threshold, speed has no bearing in the
fatalities whatsoever.But I prefer to lobby
for something which can also be argued as causal, but which I have the ability
to impact, because absent getting close to A. Einstein’s magical color shifts, I
don’t see any chance I will impact time very much.That causality is CONTROL.Think about it.A Navy jet approaches a carrier deck
intending to land.If the deck suddenly
rises, the pilot will no longer control the stop; the fantail will.And in doing so, the sailor will likely
become shark bait.However, if the deck
does not rise, and the pilot places the hook where it will grab the wire, he
will sustain what is ruefully referred to in some circles (especially around landing-gear
engineering groups) as a “controlled crash”, during which time he will
decelerate at rates we Porsche Pushers can only drool about.And he will loosen his belts and climb out
and walk away unhurt.The obvious truth
here is that, in the case of all the aforementioned fatalities, the sudden
uncontrolled stop is what killed them, because your body has stuff which keeps
moving even after the shell which contains it has stopped.And that is also true for the automobile
within which that body rides.The secret
to survival, then, is to limit the rate of deceleration so as not to exceed the
acceptable threshold of your body’s tolerance.And you can only do that be exercising some measure of control DURING
that deceleration.

Obviously, jumping from a building in a Hugo Boss suit is
inadequate.But stunt men have successfully
made such jumps without injury by controlling the deceleration rate at the
bottom through air cushions.Much as I
hate the things, airbags certainly provide the potential to control the same
thing in a horizontal mode.But no
stuntman in his right mind would ever contemplate a car stunt without a full
safety roll cage, to assure the rest of the metal around him will deform to
disipate the kinetic energy without deforming anything into HIS space, nor
without a safety harness.And that is
where the mighty mystery of science has been undervalued.We all know that belts will hold you in
place, giving you at least some modicum of opportunity to exert dynamic
avoidance loading (steering, dummy) on what would otherwise be a lethal
carriage steered precisely toward the worst target by a hapless hanger-on.But few understand that the “long chain” which
James Burke wrote about in his excellent series “Connections” is used in its most
benevolent way almost by accident (if you’ll pardon the pun).

There is a reason seatbelts are made of a woven
polypropylene or polyester, instead of cotton or linen.Under stress, the natural fibers will
elongate to only a small fraction above their natural state before accumulating
high structural loading, immediately followed by ultimate yield.That’s engineer speak for “they break”.Synthetics, however, especially in a woven
form, will elongate to well past 200% of original length, and will build
stresses in a much more linear fashion, therein distributing the load over
longer TIME, ergo deceleration rate.

And now the secret wonder.But first, think about airbags as we know them.Excepting the minor (and non-selectable by
user) manufacturing variations in propellant response, an airbag pretty much
exerts a certain force in a certain time on whatever it finds there.Ergo kids being killed thereby.Now picture the difference between a 50 lb
child, and my fabulous 350 lb of downforce physique.A loose equivalency would be comparing a
limited partnership with a multinational corporation.But the lowly SEATBELT is in large measure self
adjusting, simply by the expedient of the physical body structure it
restrains.A child will have the
shortest extension of the belt, while a man of my girth will have a long
extension to reach around me.Since the
elongation of the webbing, otherwise identical in cross section for all, is a
function of load distributed over length, you can see that the time base for
elongation in either case is very similar for similar impact velocities.But a belt at half the length will deform the
same percent with half the mass at the same velocity as a belt twice the length
will with twice the mass.An automatic,
self regulating, ten dollar bit of excellent engineering, even if noone
actually engineered it that way to begin with.Which is another Law, but we’ll suffice it to say we’d rather be lucky
than good if we must select between them.

And now that you’ve almost finished reading this trash, is
there really anything you didn’t know about The Law?Yes.Even in Quebec, where you would swear the language differences must
account for misreading those 100 KILLometer speed signs, The Law is the
same.Wear your belts, and prove the
others wrong.